The mystery of how our brains perceive sound has deepened, now that musicians have smashed a limit on sound perception imposed by a famous algorithm. On the upside this means it should be possible to improve upon today's gold-standard methods for audio perception. Devised over 200 years ago, the Fourier transform is a mathematical process that splits a sound wave into its individual frequencies. It is the most common method for digitising analogue signals and some had thought that brains make use of the same algorithm when turning the cacophony of noise around us into individual sounds and voices.